Skipper Calum's Story

For all of you wondering if you’ve missed the boat, the first thing to know is that it's really never too late to start Infant Potty Training aka Elimination Communication but the earlier you do, the easier it is and the quicker baby learns to signal and use the toilet.

In the first weeks of life, potty-training should take a back seat to the family’s rest and recovery from the birth and until a feeding routine is established and running smoothly.

Fortunately for our family these were accomplished relatively easily. My husband and I were committed to both breast feeding and potty-training so I as the mother was not alone in fine-tuning these activities. I can't emphasize how important this was for me because if I'd been left mostly alone to figure both of them out, I probably would have put off the pottying. As it was, we were able to begin in Calum’s second week of life and it has been an exciting and gratifying journey for all of us!

At first we held the lad over a basin about 10 minutes after his feedings (as many as we could manage) until we started to discern a pattern of his eliminations. Unfortunately, the patterns seemed to change frequently and after we’d thought we had a bit of a routine figured out it would change! After a few weeks of this we decided that to cut out the basin and hold him directly over the toilet which has meant a lot less work and running back and forth to the bathroom. We also change him in the bathroom now and have a set-up there that is both safe and comfortable for him.

We use a combination of timing, intuition, and some observations and ‘catch’ 90% of his bowel movements. We take him whenever he wakes up from a nap and first thing in the morning, and then ever 2-3 hours above and beyond that. At these times, we hold him over the toilet and he gets a chance to urinate as well. We figure that he is learning that he gets a chance to void every few hours and eventually as he gains more muscular control, this will help him get past the diaper phase of his life entirely.

Incidentally, we use cloth diapers although at the very beginning we used disposables until we felt a bit more under control with our lives. With cloth diapers, the child is aware that he/she is wet, unlike the disposables which mask the sensation and probably delay the diaper-fee stage.

Another thing we started doing about a month ago was to use sign language to signal “toilet” just before we pick him up to hold him over the toilet. He’s now 8 months’ old and hasn’t started signing this back to us but we hope he will sometime in the next little while so we can get some direct communication happening.

Speaking of communication – this is a critical feature of IPT today. Although in the past, some IPT had been practiced in North America and England, it was apparently frought with guilt, criticism, and anxiety. The key to the current practice is to make it a stress-free opportunity to communicate about this vital bodily function, to spend more quality time with your infant while doing so, and to accept the “misses” with humour.